Notices by Glen T, heated, not stirred (glent@aus.social)

@jeffowski Ignoring that Peter is proto-incel, here is the reference

Peter 3: (3) Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. (4) Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.

I bring to your notice the hair in the poster.

The International Olympic Committee has decided the sex of competitors will be determined by the SRY gene marking 'female' competitors.

Of course this leads to an amusing contradiction: there will be people who are required to compete in the men's event, but who's drug testing will have to happen using women's protocols because their genes could never produce a penis.

But beyond amusement, some initial thoughts -- not on Olympic sport, there will be plenty of commentary on the elites in the media -- but on community sport.

Olympic standards are often adopted far beyond the Olympics themselves. This is a worry with about 0.1% of people having some Difference in Sex Development. A volunteer sports administrator -- who is a car mechanic the rest of the week -- is going to be telling a person that a supposedly low-stakes genetic test has results which say "sorry, you are not the gender you have been living all your life and that your exterior sexual organs suggest" and "by the way, you're infertile". They may be saying this to someone so young as to not be sure what any of sex, gender and infertility is or means for their life.

Governments need to very quickly step in here and set regulations for the conduct of the test, communication of the results, and who pays for the test and the fallout. Since the sport requires the test (rather than a simple statement of gender from the competitor), the sport should foot the bill for the fallout. Someone just wanting to swim in 'masters' ex-amateur-age swimming shouldn't be footing the bill for complex and specialist counselling because the organisation is following Olympic rules so that their swimming sessions can use a Commonwealth-funded swimming pool.

The fetishisation of the Olympics by funding bodies also needs to end. Chess has a women's category because of gender issues: FIDE recognises that women face more obstacles learning and playing chess, and wants to give women a class in which to have enjoyable and competitive games. Determining the gender class using the presence of particular hormones during puberty is to completely miss the point. This rationale is hardly unique to chess, and it at odds with the athletics focus of the IOC's approach.

#olympics

@skinnylatte 'Square' as in the credit card processor? Because emerging risks to infrastructure are a reportable event to the Australian financial regulator APRA.

@jrdepriest @thomasfuchs A lot of my suggestions turned out to be just beyond 50 years old. Microprocessors, TCP, Unix.

I think I'll go with the iPhone 3G, aka, 'the smartphone'. And yeah, that has microprocessors and TCP and Unix. My argument would be that the integration of all those technologies created another thing entirely.

Before video doorbells there was another spy on the neighbourhood.

@christophehenry @ricci A partial history is here

https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=events:free_licenses

Subsequent events showed that SCO were not in fact able to offer this license, Novell actually owned the Unix source code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Novell,_Inc.

Novell settled a suit with UCB which effectively makes non-Ancient Unix available under the free BSD License

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.

And the remaining copyrights in Ancient Unix are so confused that it's unclear who owns what. Except to say that this is also a barrier for a litigant, who would live in fear of a countersuit by one of the other potential partial copyright holders (eg, University of NSW or University of Melbourne). For this most-ancient version it is likely that OpenText Corporation hold the copyrights, assuming they have not expired.

Moreover, copyright is an economic law. It's difficult to see what the disputed amount could possibly be for which compensation is sought. Remember that modern Unix source code is already free.

@ai6yr Always loved this

@pluralistic Australian television shows on US politics often have a tone of despair at just how bad the Democratic Party is at the art of politics. And, related to that, how the Party lacks the ability to make necessary hard decisions.

Especially around asking people to retire. Arguably that one failing has doomed the Party (Ginsburg, Biden, Feinstein, Connolly, Pelosi, ...). Even Harris and Walz were coming to a Presidential election at the end of their careers. There is a different timeline where the Democratic Party retained power in the national legislature and courts simply by not dying in place.

@steter I read that as 'ten bullshits' and it struck me as a underestimate for Elon

@cczona @nixCraft Most computers used in enterprise don't allow a shell, and absolutely refuse to allow a program to be written.

This explains a lot of Excel and some use of LLMs.

For example, this is the minimum security stance suggested for Australian business:

https://www.cyber.gov.au/business-government/asds-cyber-security-frameworks/essential-eight

Buying a fridge as I can't get a $20 replacement centre hinge for a Hoover D37TC. Not going to complain, as the fridge is 25 years old. The hinge is a metal cast part so there's no easy way to make a replacement.

If you have a recommendation against Haier then this would be a good moment to mention that.

https://www.costco.com.au/c/Haier-433L-500-Series-Refrigerator-Bottom-Freezer-White-HRF420BW/p/229860

@ascentale @kf @Kleen @bikenite A4.

The roadside repair membership organisation in South Australia covers bicycles. Worst case they'll call a tow truck, just like they do for your car, with the same free distance for the tow.

Talking with the RAA when this launched, they are keen to keep members even when they change transport modes. They seemed to understand the assignment, making it clear that people aren't going to be abandoned by the side of the road.

(I carry the usual 'roadie' saddlebag with tube, tune repair kit, CO2 inflator, minitool, gloves, and two train/bus tickets -- one for me, one for the bike.)

#BikeNite

That moment when you are explaining to the new CEO that 'research' means I have some popular product developments I have participated in for which our revenue is zero. The more popular it is, the harder revenue slams to zero.

The US selling "AI" chips to China in return for a 15% cut is an interesting change. It shows the diminished power of the Pentagon, as there's not a huge gap between "AI" chips and a semiconductor "Radar warning reciever"

McDonalds Australia have accelerated making an identity distinct from the US parent company McDonalds.

"McDonalds" doesn't appear on any packaging or in-store display. Even their website is now avoiding "McDonalds" and using "Maccas".

Watching US liberals fight for a return to the status quo of quiet wage and labour exploitation of agricultural workers is really something.

#auspol

@n_dimension @thomasfuchs You make the flawed assumption that "AI tech" will advance, despite all the best training data already have being used.

Sure models may get cheaper to train, and there may be more handrails to prevent the worst outcomes. But even for a modest goal of 100x fewer incorrect results there is simply no path.

@nixCraft The person clearly wants to develop software, has been banging their head against the hardest part of the craft, and their choice of tools let them down.

Before people say "start with real tools", here are the instructions for using the beginner-friendly Python language to make an IOS app:

https://kivy.org/doc/stable/guide/packaging-ios.html

The industry has clearly let down beginning programmers. Let's not blame them for choosing ridiculous places to start from when we have not provided sane places to start from.

WTF Korea?

@stilgherrian LOL. NSW HSC once had a question about the storage type of phone numbers, with the 'correct' answer being integer. That is, 000 is stored as 0, which isn't quite going to get an ambulance to your door when dialled

Another trap is the difference between a phone number (E.164, 15 characters) and a dial string -- the actions taken to place the call to that number, particular to a handset's environment.